Commentary on Political Economy

Saturday, 3 March 2018

The Chinese Catastrophe

In this post, we wish to advert to a number of misconceptions surrounding the coming co-optation by the Chinese Dictatorship of Big Brother Xi Jin Ping to a lifelong term as President Of His (not the People’s!) Republic of China. First, contrary to what all media seem foolishly to believe, the centralisation of all decision-making power in Big Brother is the final confirmation of the weakness and fear of the Chinese Dictatorship: it most certainly is not a statement of strength. Had the Dictatorship been confident about (a) the chances of social development and economic growth of Chinese society, and (b) its ability to impose its socio-economic system outside China, it would never have agreed to this act of suicide.

It is almost self-evident, and historia docet (history teaches), that a confident and exuberant regime or indeed polity would never consciously decide to let one Dictator arrogate all social and political power in his hands. It had long been known that the Dictatorship’s choices were either to save Party and lose the country or else to save the country and dissolve the Party. This latest desperate act of hara kiri shows conclusively that it has chosen the former course. Cornered and besieged on all sides, with the economy close to contraction and a collapsing financial system, the Dictatorship knew that any further opening of Chinese economy and society would result in its repentine irrelevance. Given that the Chinese Politburo is made up of a kleptomaniac plutocracy, these inveterate murderers must know that their fate and that of their families would soon be sealed. The only solution, of course, is a return to the totalitarian genocide of Mao Tze Dung's infamous "Cultural Revolution".

Similarly, in this perspective, the One Belt One Road strategy is one last desperate stratagem on the Dictatorship‘s part to achieve two fundamental aims: one, to preempt encirclement in the form of a cordon sanitaire on the part of parliamentary democracies from India to Japan, and two, to unload its internal contradictions by exporting them over a formal and informal empire in terms of (a) the migration and overseas posting of potentially dangerous elements and (b) the requisition of economic resources needed to pacify the Chinese population - which, be it noted, remains among the very poorest in the world.. This project - this "final solution", Hitler's Lebensraum - is common to all dictatorships: imperialism is vital to their survival - in the guise not merely of nationalism but rather of fascist and racist expansion - because they need to unload their internal conflict outside their borders through territorial expansion, absolute exploitation of occupied territories, loot and rapine. (For an elementary exposition of this point, please refer to J. Schumpeter, Imperialism and Social Classes; also to H. Arendt, Imperialism; and finally to M. De Cecco, Money and Empire.)